I hope this finds you well. I just wanted to update you on some goings on down here in New Zealand.

Last Thursday, just as the sun was rising over our capital of Wellington, four activists scaled our parliament building to install solar panels on the roof and drop a large, satirical banner targeting the Prime Minister.

Check it out:

The reason for the early start was to call upon the government to take real action on climate change… now! Despite our global clean and green image, our record on climate action is poor. A recent public consultation on what pollution reduction targets NZ should take to Paris was a total farce, with the Government falsely claiming the bigger the target, the greater the cost will be to the economy. It was an attempt to persuade the public that we should do no... Read more >

And it’s scary because this is basically what the government is going to do to reduce pollution. Not only is it Bridges’ job to know about it, but it’s also pretty straightforward.

To be fair, not everyone will be as cosy with the term as us policy wonks who lie awake worrying about these things, but come on - the guy is paid 250 grand a year of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash to know this stuff.

So, when in response to a parliamentary question, Bridges feigned naivety and asked what "she means by ‘emissions reduction targets’" and requested for Woods to be more specific, my head fell crashing int... Read more >

The government’s deep sea oil programme is failing. There I said it. Like other polluting businesses around the world, the deep sea oil industry has been stunned by the seismic shift in investor support for clean power.

Shareholders, pension funds and financial powerhouses are all looking to a future where pollution is taken out of our economy and our homes and businesses are powered by cleaner, safer sources of energy. And it’s starting to hurt the oil industry.

At recent meetings, top executives from Shell, Statoil and Chevron were rocked by the level of discontent raised by shareholders, who felt they faced huge financial risk due to their company’s lack of plan to deal with climate change.

As a result, proposals were tabled requiring the companies to disclose just how much their busi... Read more >

The bean counters at the Treasury have warned government that failing to reduce pollution in New Zealand could cost the taxpayer an eye watering, economy wrecking $52 billion. And John Key’s government want to keep the public in the dark about it.

When asked about this figure in Parliament, the reply from Tim Groser was “what Treasury got wrong was that it did not use sufficiently sophisticated software to conceal the redacted information”. In other words, don’t front it to the public.

The Government is currently running a hurried consultation on what pollution reduction t... Read more >

But it's a sham. Targets without a plan of action are meaningless, and guess what? New Zealand doesn’t have a plan. As things stand, our climate pollution will continue to spiral out of control.

We need an action plan that we can stick to. In the same way the All Blacks focus on winning by training hard, maintaining a healthy diet and living well, New Zealand needs to kick it’s dirty fossil fuel habit and get in shape for a cleaner, brighter future.

The thing with the targets this government seems to like so much is that they happen in the future and can be missed.